News of the week

China Unbans Bitcoin

Bitcoin is now is official asset in China, after a year of ban by the Shenzhen Court of International Arbitration after ordering it in 2017. Nearing the end of last year, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading as a whole was banned by the Chinese government. According to a recent report by CnLedger, virtual currencies have been legalized as a mode of payment to be accepted by people and business entities.

Ahead of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, mining giant Bitmain has deployed around 90,000 Antminer S9 machines to the western Chinese region of Xinjiang. The BCH network will hard fork on Nov. 15, and Bitmain is reported to be strategizing its role in the forthcoming computing “power war” by reaching out to local mining farms in the coal-rich region of Xianjing.

Data storage company Seagate and IBM have announced a initiative to fight counterfeit hard drives using blockchain technology. The project will use IBM’s Blockchain Platform to help manufacturers, integrators, and business partners better authenticate the drives. Seagate’s solution will work by updating the IBM Blockchain Platform on the IBM Cloud with product authentication data based on Seagate Secure Electronic ID (eID), the latter of which creates a unique identifier at the point of manufacture that can later be used to verify the identity of a given hard drive at any point during its life cycle.

A subsidiary of Japan’s Nomura Research Institute unveiled a new blockchain security alert tool in partnership with U.S. blockchain software company ConsenSys. The tool, dubbed the “Blockchain Security Monitoring Service,” is aimed to increase security in blockchain implementations, informing operators about “vulnerabilities.” The solution’s first outing will target smart contract weaknesses while at the same time the company will work with ConsenSys’ Diligence team on expanding its security offering.

Amazon Web Services collaborated with a Kaleido startup to help enterprises implement blockchain technology. Kaleido Marketplace will provide tools and protocols for all the components of new blockchain projects, “from the app all the way to the chain”. Kaleido is one of more than 50 blockchain projects overseen by ConsenSys, the blockchain technology company and incubator launched by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin in 2014.

Bitcoin appears to remain an attractive alternative to the current financial system in the United Kingdom. A bitcoin survey, carried out by YouGov, has found that one in five people in the U.K. think bitcoin will be “as common as cash or card” payments in future. The survey found that nine out of ten (93%) of people in the U.K. say they have heard of bitcoin—with just over one in five (23%) say they understand it “fairly” well.